Relevent XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1905/
god damn i love relevant xkcds
Now don’t dry it off and keep it in the cupboard for a few days
But you gotta soak it then go on a vacation for a couple weeks first
I love my cast iron pan, but I really cannot get the perfect sheen that everyone else seems to get. The bottom of mine is non-stick now, and I season regularly, but the sides always seem to chip away eventually. Once the chipping starts, I have no idea how to stop other than to strip it entirely and start again.
I think you need to resurface it when that happens.
Scrolled past this before reality set in after a few seconds
I’ve got one that I need someone to do this to so I can start over. It’s older than I am and was poorly taken care of for several years before I got it.
The cast iron I bought for myself is all in good condition. That one means a lot because of where it comes from but I don’t have the patience to scrape all that shit off. I wish someone would do it for me so I could enjoy the pan my grandaddy cooked me bacon in.
Drill with an abrasive scubbing pad on it will sort it out real quick.
That really depends on the condition of the pan. I’ve had some where power tools were insufficient.
I have yet to see any kind of powered abrasive that WON"T get to the bare metal in a right quick manor. It’s kind of what the stuff is made for…
Just put it in the oven on cleaning mode if you have a self cleaning oven
My oven uses some weird “eco-friendly” self-cleaning process that involves pouring water into it and steaming the dirt off, which doesn’t sound like it would be good for the pan. Got any alternatives? I found a Griswold at the thrift store a few years back and I’d like to be able to restore it without damaging it.
Btw, copper sponge is really good for such things. Hard enough for cooked-in stuff but soft enough to not scratch.
I find the scrub daddy brushes to be the perfect fit for cleaning my cast iron as well.
coat that sucker with avocado oil and bring it up to 200°C for a few minutes. Allow it to cool, repeat until the sides don’t hold any oil, then switch to crisco solid shortening for a few rounds.
I love that everyone is showing up to give real advice to this post.
It’s the goal of the original picture, people can’t help but give cast iron advice.
The thing is, if you take care of it, the pan will outlive the owner. There’s just not many products with that kind of life these days.
What does the avocado oil base do? I’ve never seasoned a cast iron pan from scratch before.
You can use various different food oils, the important part is that it can leave a (food safe) polymerized coat that binds to the surface, protecting it from rusting as well as making it non-stick
In addition to what the other person said, olive oil has a high smoke point, meaning it has to get pretty darn hot before it creates smoke. It handles heat a lot better than other oils.
Did you mean to say avocado oil there? I love the stuff.
Shit yeah lol IM half awake
I bet she was so grateful. It takes a ton of scrubbing.
And this post will be exhibit A in the divorce proceedings
Divorce? People have been murdered for less…
I knew nothing about cast iron pan care when I met my SO and I did his dishes for him one day and washed it with soap and water. I still hate the damn things and think they’re filthy and nasty.
It’s actually fine to use soap and water, otherwise it is in fact, filthy and nasty. Don’t believe the indoctrinated
It’s both true and not true. Using something like dawn or similar is fine, using a lye soap will fuck your shit up.
Thanks for the details on this, luckily modern soap doesn’t have lye anymore.
You’re not lyeing to us, are you? ;)
Go to bed, dad!
It forms a thin layer of ‘plastic’ when you season it. The oil polymerizes afaik.
MinuteFood on youtube did a video just yesterday talking about the science of cast iron, and why they’re not dirty like many people seem to think.
Oh this helps xD.
Weird english people and their weird words just to confuse others.
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Just burn it on the highest flame after every use. The grime will be all disinfected by the heat. You can stop when you smell the specific odor of burning rubber and see black fumes, this means your burnt oil coating is denaturating.
I used to think that was the way, but medium heat for longer is better. Less cancerous too.
I wish you said it’s supposed to be cleaned before using. What good is it in knowing it was disinfected after it’s last use … 10 months ago?
You burn the grease after cooking so that your skillet won’t stink with rotten lard when you don’t use it for a year.
Reapplying the oil coating before cooking is a good practice, you’ll also burn all the dust. But you then need to let it cool to allow oil to polymerize and lock all that cancer below the coating.
As someone allergic to dust and averse to cancer, I’ll mute this cursed thread and sign up to a normie cooking sub 😂
It’s fine to wash them with modern dish soaps. The reason people say not to is because dish soaps used to have lye in them, which would destroy the seasoning. Just make sure you wipe the water off instead of letting it air dry or it can rust.
Oh shit I didn’t know that!
I just put it back on the stove on full heat for a minute to dry off the water.
Don’t do this if you have hard water.
Spray a little high smoke point oil on it and wipe it down with a towel while it’s hot
I too watched the MinuteFood video on this yesterday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0R1jVN3LaY
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I keep reading the word seasoning, and for non native speakers this is hard. What are you all meaning? You put some garlic, salt and pepper on the pan and let it be?
It’s more like like a seasoned veteran, not cooking seasoning.
You aren’t throwing garlic on the pan and then putting it in the cupboard. You build up layers of polymerized oil on the pan as you cook on it.
Seasoning in this specific context means the residue of the food oil which forms a surface coating when heated up to a certain temperature. It protects the surface from rusting.
It does protect from rust somewhat(water can still cause rust if left on it) but the big deal is it makes the cookware non-stick without Teflon.
In this context, it means to coat the cast iron with oil and/or fat and heat it until the oils polymerize as a thin film stuck to the surface of the pan. This prevents the cast iron from rusting and presents a non-stick surface. It’s honestly more like varnishing the pan than “seasoning” it.
English is dumb. We got the term “seasoned” to mean like a veteran fighter, something aging properly and using salt and spice from the French “assaisoner” which means “to ripen / to improve with time” which we expanded upon by being like “when things become tastier” which is how we started applying it to using spices and salt…
In this case it means sort of speed running getting the oil sheen a cast iron cooking implement used to naturally get by just using it over and over when cooking over wood or peat hence “ripening” the pan. Way back in the day in England and France they didn’t really use soap for dishes. You washed them with water and left them outside in UV light to sterilize them so all iron cooking things tended to naturally develop that nice carbon coat. Time and use made them better hence “seasoned”.
Oil is placed on the pan and then it is heated to form a non-stick coating. This layer can have small holes in it, so the process is repeated many times. The holes do not line up, which makes the path for water to get through much longer or blocks it. This means water can not easily make it through all of the layers. That also means any water that gets in can’t easily get out, and it can cause rust to form if it makes it through the coating and is left on there.
What if you have a new cast iron and accidentally let a wet dish sit on it in a drawer and it rusted? Hypothetically of course…
Steel wool to take off the rust and re-season
Thank you. Do you have any seasoning tips or recommendations?
Not OP, but the Lodge seasoning guide is a pretty good starting point. Cast iron being used forever is proof of how resilient it can be, there’s not too many things you can do that are irreparable.
Also, you don’t really need to baby it as much as most people say. Just keep using it and it’ll keep getting better.
Avocado oil is really good, and it’s important to have a super thin layer of oil. Just put a little in the pan and then evenly coat it with a papertowel and wipe out as much oil as possible… and then wipe it out some more. It will look like there’s nothing there and thats how you want it. Place in the oven on its highest setting like 450+ for 45min, let it cool a bit and then do it again. You should do this 3-4 times for a nice seasoning.
There’s this old cowboy on YouTube that has a good video on restoring cast irons I forget his name though
Cowboy Kent Rollins? I like that guy.
That’s the cool part- no matter what happens to your cast iron pans, it can be fixed. You scratch or chip a non-stick coating and the pan is pretty much ruined.
Bruh.
I was young and had never touched cast iron.
They don’t need the hell scrubbed out of them like stainless steel and they don’t cause cancer like Teflon. They also sear meats way better than any other pans.
Then as others have already said, it’s fine to gand wash them if you’d like. You just don’t grind/scrub off the carbonized oil layers.
I’ve never had to scrub the stainless steel ones actually, they are terrific.
Well what the ueck are you doing, because I sure have. We have a higher end ss pan and it’s way worse than our cast iron skillets. Cook scrambled eggs in it and you’ll need a power sander to get that thing clean.
Don’t worry. They feel the same way about you. :-)
Minute Food did a video on this recently.
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You mean “ex-wife”…😵
make me think of this guy that transformed his iron pan into a mirror
For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id2GLt8Nd4s
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I didn’t go that crazy, but I did use an orbital sander on a cheap Lodge cast iron pan, and it’s much more non-stick now.
The smoother the surface you start with, the smaller the surface texture that the seasoning needs to smooth out, the harder it is for food to grip the surface.
I am tempted to 1200 grit random orbit a pan and see how good life can be.
Just get a carbon steel pan instead and save yourself some trouble. Once seasoned it is much more non stick than cast iron and It also is lighter so easier to handle.
I think they meant the guy that seasoned his pan like 200(?) times before cooking in it on Reddit. That thing was SHINY when he was done
Yeah, on the cast iron subreddit. 100 coats
Yes, that’s what I had in mind
The amount of disgusting freaks that don’t know you need to wash this and reapply the seasoning with oil in the oven is insane to me.
Dude, you’re not supposed to scrape off the seasoning every time you wash the pan. I reapply a bit of oil maybe once or twice a year. I normally just wash it some soap and water after cooking.
I don’t use soap, I just use a bit of hot water with the kitchen faucet sprayer and I have a flat metal spatula to scrape off any stuck on bits… wipe with paper towel and that’s it.
Needs washed, but you can just heat the oil on the stove if you’ve seasoned the thing in the first place.
I learned from a chef that an oven would work better due to the even heat applied all over but in a pinch or if you don’t want to do all that, the stove top could be fine.
That’s the main reason I do an oven seasoning once a year or so. With my electric stove, it’ll get the bottom ripping hot while the sides won’t ever quite catch up.
In the oven I can do an even, set 450-500 and hold it there as long as I like. Then I can shut it off and let the pan cool slowly and evenly.
First of all a properly seasoned cast iron pan can and should be washed with modern dishwashing liquid. If the seasoning comes off with 'hand friendly ’ soap it was garbage seasoning anyway.
Second, this looks perfectly ready for seasoning. Nothing wrong with that. Just get the outdoor grill going grab some short chain oil and get to work.
Short chain oil!? At first I thought you were bs’ing about seasoning a pan with gear oil.
That sent me down a novel rabbit hole. Thanks for your input!
I don’t get the joke. I just tried Google and it had nothing for seasoning cast iron with chain or gear oil. Is this a thing?
The chains being referred to here are molecular chains, not mechanical ones.
Thank you. That joke/wordplay went straight over my head.
Are you sure, I thought if a single molecule of soap touches my pan it would instantly look like this?
Nope. I often use dish soap and a soft scrub pad on my cast iron just like my Grandmother and mother did with those same cast iron pans and dutch oven. A decent seasoning on cast iron is probably more durable than non-stick coatings. Just keep it out of the dishwasher. The high temp hot water and caustic dishwasher detergents WILL damage your seasoning. But, then you just need to re-season to fix it all better again.
My lazy way to keep my cast iron and plain high carbon steel wok properly seasoned is to clean with hot water and mild dish soap then return to the stove top heat on high until hot, then shut the burner off and hit the insides with a light quick spray of cooking oil. Or I just use some plain vegetable oil and wipe on a thin coating with a paper towel. and leave it cool.
Nah this is more reduce a tomato sauce territory.
Modern dish soap is not acidic or a base so it’s quite harmless to the patina, but it’s also superfluous because you generally don’t want to degrease the thing which is the only thing that soap is good for. Boiling some plain water in it cleans off anything that you want to get rid off. If you’re terrified of bugs when not using soap for some reason get yourself a bonfire and heat your pan as hot as you want for as long as you want nothing will survive that. Just make sure to not melt it.
War
He’s dead
